OpenAI, New York Times case tees up key test of AI training under copyright law

The New York Times

08/09/2026 16:14

Competing summary judgment bids ask Judge Sidney Stein to decide fair use
Authors, news outlets say generative AI threatens writers
OpenAI, Microsoft call training 'transformative,' say it doesn't threaten creators
By Blake Brittain
Sept 8 (Reuters) - OpenAI, Microsoft MSFT.O, the New York Times NYT.N and a group of prominent authors have laid out sharply differing views on one of the highest-stakes questions in copyright law in their dispute over AI training.
The tech companies and copyright owners both asked U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein in Manhattan on Friday for rulings in their favor on the companies' "fair use" defense, which is likely to determine which side wins the case. 
The Times' lawsuit, first filed in 2023, accuses ​OpenAI and its largest financial ​backer Microsoft of using ⁠millions of newspaper articles without permission to train ChatGPT. A group of authors, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin, separately sued the companies the same year for using their books to train OpenAI's popular chatbot.
Those cases and other related lawsuits were consolidated in New York last year. Dozens of other complaints have also been brought by copyright owners against tech companies over what they call the theft of their material to train AI systems. 
The ​pending cases will likely turn on whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create transformative new content. The first two judges to consider the issue issued diverging rulings last year.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco called Anthropic's use of books for AI training “quintessentially transformative."
Judge Vince Chhabria, also in San Francisco, ruled for Meta in a similar case two days later and also called its use of copyrighted books transformative. Chhabria warned, however, that AI training would not be fair use “in many circumstances” and raised concerns that generative AI could “flood the market” with content that competes with human creators.
The authors echoed Chhabria in their filing on Friday, arguing that AI is "diluting the market for books across the board," and that fair use "does not countenance such catastrophic threats to the incentive to create."
In their brief, the news outlets said that ChatGPT diverts users from their websites and also displaces the market for their work.
"Defendants’ competitive exploitation of Plaintiffs' expressive works cannot be excused" under court precedent, the outlets said.
Citing Alsup, OpenAI told the Manhattan court that the use of copyrighted work for AI training is "among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes" and said that its technology has not harmed writers.
"The purpose of OpenAI’s pretraining process was to derive broad, unprotectable statistical patterns related to language that can be used to create new text, not reproduce protected expression," OpenAI said in a brief addressing the authors' case.
Microsoft also told Stein on Friday that fears that LLMs would displace authors and journalists were unfounded.
"Plaintiffs began this case speculating that LLMs would destroy their very livelihoods," Microsoft said in a brief addressing the authors' case. "Years of discovery later, the record is clear: Neither LLM training nor the use of LLMs in products substitutes for copyrighted books.” 
The case is In re OpenAI Inc Copyright Infringement Litigation, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:25-md-03143.
For OpenAI: Andrew Gass of Latham & Watkins, Joseph Gratz of Morrison & Foerster, Robert Van Nest of Keker Van Nest & Peters
For Microsoft: Annette Hurst of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe
For the authors: Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey
For the news outlets: Ian Crosby and Davida Brook of Susman Godfrey

(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington)